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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27012043">our inner monsters</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/winter_angst/pseuds/winter_angst'>winter_angst</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Captain America (Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Cannibalism, M/M, Slight pining, Wendigo</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 04:12:53</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,371</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27012043</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/winter_angst/pseuds/winter_angst</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack's job has some benefits.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jack Rollins/Brock Rumlow</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>our inner monsters</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterlollipop/gifts">winterlollipop</a>, <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalika_999/gifts">Kalika999 (kalika_999)</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The rain came down in sheets, pounding against the earth in heavy thuds. Jack stood in the window, watching it come down, a dark silhouette with the lamp light swollen behind him. Thunder trembled the earth but the mansion stood steady. It blended with the night, a few windows lit up saved it from bleeding into the abyss. It stood there, erected despite the inhospital terrain. It afforded the level privacy the Rollins needed, detached from the human world because there was little humanity on the island. It existed against all odds, braving the elements and its visitors. It existed solely for those, in fact. Visitors. There was a veil of mystery to it that the outside world was aware of. There was nothing anyone could put a finger on but they knew enough to give Jack a wide berth when on the mainland, adhering to that feeling in their gut they got with the silent man passed him. He looked normal, rather handsome and well built with slicked back black hair. He looked like he had a nice smile, even with his scar. He never smiled and no one expected him to. Even when greeted with the shining smile of a young child, he didn’t so much as blink. Children quickly feared him as their parents did. </p><p>Safety was away from that island and its strange, apathetic inhabitant. During the summer months he would place a single ad in the newspaper, inviting campers to his island for an shockingly low fee of twenty dollars a day with transportation both ways included. The locals would never sign up -- anyone who met Jack Rollins rarely wanted anything to do with afterwards unless necessary. He had dead green eyes, the kind of eyes that left one’s soul recoiling. So, no, no local would ever want to be stuck on an island with a man like that. </p><p>But that was what attracted young people. They would see the ad and locals would give urgent warnings about the Jack Rollins and the dark mansion fringed with a dark tangle of woods one could be lost in easily. They shrugged off the warnings with ease, fueled rather than discouraged by the rumors. These were the kind of eager campers with something to prove, the need to beat the odds. Juvenile and impulsive they were people who, once recognised as missing, would never be traced back to this island, an island that was little more than a dot on a map. And that was what made them so perfect. During the off season Jack spent his days inside the mansion, prowling from room to room, listening to calls from the woods. Tonight he couldn’t hear them, the torrential rain swallowed all sounds, consuming the island. He took the lamp to the dining room where several others lit up the kitchen. Jack opened the fridge and pulled out the sweetbread soaking in milk. </p><p>He moved with purpose, movements that were muscle memory. He blanched them in boil water, gazing out the window, watching the rain flow down the panes before he took the sweetbread out of the boiling water and shocked it in cold water to firm it up. Then, reducing beef stock and squeezed lemon sauce for an acidic aspect, he dropped butter into a hot pan and fried the sweetbread. He deglazed the pan with the reduction and rested it in the sauce with a cover over it. The mansion had electricity but the harsh overhead light bothered his guest so he used candles and oil lamps. The smell of freshly cooked meat spread through the cavernous kitchen, the dining table situated beneath a chandelier, lit with electricity but faded too low to bother his guest. He wandered into the great hall. Behind him were bifurcated stairs that looked directly from the Titanic: one sweeping, handsome set of stairs that split off into two smaller flights going in opposite directions. He stood before the double doors that stood near eight feet. He took both handles in hand and swept them open in time for a boom of thunder and a crack of lightning that lit up his late night guest. </p><p>It highlighted his outline for a moment. Seven and a half feet from foot to antler, though they stretched three feet within themselves. He had a head that resembled the skull of a deer with leathery black skin stretched over. Dark eyes settled deep in his skull, body long and lean, arms nearly hanging to his knees with long claws on each finger. He had hock jointed legs and clawed feet. His guest had come, as expected.</p><p>“You’re soaked,” Jack said. “Wait while I fetch a towel.” </p><p>The creature made a noise of displeasure but he obeyed. When Jack returned it reached out a clawed hand and wiped it’s body dry before dropping it on the floor and prowling towards the smell of food. Jack sighed and picked it up. He deposited it into the laundry chute. The creature was prowling towards the table, following the smell of the plates laid out. </p><p>“I don’t recall inviting you to the table yet,” Jack said brushing past him.</p><p>The candlelight illuminated it’s gaunt face and stretching antlers. His shadow flickered on the back wall where the dark curtains were tied up. It made a chattering noise, a complaint, and Jack ignored it the way one would ignore a child’s pleading for a treat. Jack lit the candelabrum and sat down, placing.</p><p>“Please, sit.” </p><p>The chattering of displeasure stopped and the creature fit its massive body into the chair. Jack looked across the table to where it was staring at the gold gilded plate. The best plates and cutlery came out during these visits, not that his guest ever appreciated it -- or noticed. Jack noted the way its skin was stretched over its ribs, a great barrel set of ribs that made the rest of him look so thin and withered. </p><p>Jack picked up his fork and knife and the creature reached for it with a clawed hand. Jack clicked his tongue and the deer skull face turned to him, that chilling clattering coming out, directed at his host. </p><p>“You are a guest at my table,” he said, as he always did. “You’re not an animal.” </p><p>It wasn’t an animal. It had the intelligence of a man but primal urges had a habit of overriding it. That was all fine and well when it stalked in the wood under a pearly moon hung in a blanket of a night glimmering with stars. But not here, not in the Rollins mansion across from Jack. He wouldn’t stand for such behaviors at his dinner table and it knew that. The chatter continued, dissatisfied and probably angry. Jack didn’t fear their anger because it meant nothing. Without Jack they would starve. Jack’s job was thankless, save for the occasional dinner guest. The silverware was comically small in Jack’s massive clawed hands but Jack wasn’t one for jokes. He turned his attention to his own sweetbread, cutting into it and savoring it. Smooth, tender, creamy -- it was a dish to be savored and enjoyed. The outside was crispy from the pan frying and the acidic sauce paired well. </p><p>His guest seemed to agree, eating slowly as opposed to gulping it down without bothering to taste it. Although Jack wasn’t certain it had the taste buds like it once had when it was a human man, he seemed to recognize what was good and was subpar. It had a name once: Brock. He’d come to camp and Jack had taken to him. There was a fine line of what turned man to monster. A fine line of fine dining and cannibalism. Marrow was acceptable but bone broth was not. Liver was okay but spleens were not. Heart was acceptable but the brain was not. Thankfully sweetbread was always okay. Brock was the only one to take much of an interest in the reclusive man in the mansion and that intrigued Jack enough to welcome him to dinner. They had liver and onions with a glass of barbaresco because Jack could tell he was Italian with his matte-bronze skin and chestnut hued eyes. He enjoyed the meal, and more than that the wine. </p><p>Typically Jack wasn’t a fan of overindulgence but there was something about Brock and his wine reddened cheeks telling him stories from his travels that Jack liked. He was taking a gap year of college to backpack through North America. He was coming to the end of his trip and uncertain that he wanted to go back to college, as Jack guessed from the moment he mentioned ‘gap year’. He went on to talk about a fling with one of the guys he was travelling with -- who had hooked up with a different guy they were traveling with but, as Brock assured him, he was totally one hundred percent okay with. Which meant he totally one hundred percent wasn’t. Everything about Brock should have turned him off. His crass language, his lack of social etiquette, reaching towards the wine without being offered, eating too quickly without properly expressing how good it was. He did afterwards, of course, but still little things like that ground at him -- but not when it was Brock which was very strange. </p><p>It didn’t long for Jack to decide that Brock wasn’t going to be subjected to the same fate as the others. Shortly after the disappearance of a young camper, Jack invited Brock over for dinner. For him he prepared a three course meal: the appetizer was heart tartare -- beef heart for Jack and the heart of the young woman, currently on ice, for Brock. The main dish was backstrap which Jack also indulged in -- occasional deviations were allowed, his grandmother had told him. They finished the meal with sorbet and Jack urged him to come back the next night as well. It only took four days to affect him. Jack was a bit apologetic but more than that he was glad to have Brock around. He took to what he was quickly and helped pick off the remaining campers -- Jack noticed that he started with the guy who he’d had the short fling with. Jack found that amusing.</p><p>Jack came from a long line of men and women who knew about the creatures and their obligation to them was taught to him as a child when he first saw the creatures when playing further in the woods than he was meant to. Jack remembered the fear, remembered the trickle of urine that down his leg as the beast stood over him, stretching to the sky like something from a nightmare. </p><p>His mother had calmed him and told him of the island’s inhabitants who’d lived there for centuries. Rollins were the guardians of them, tasked with keeping them fed. The task had come from the 1800s when the first Rollins washed aboard with a ship of stolen gold and pirates after him. The creatures had protected him, leaving them with three boatloads of gems and gold -- the Rollins fortune. His mother couldn’t tell him how they’d communicated but from that meeting they built the mansion and a lineage job began. At first the creatures plagued his dreams. Then fear gave way to curiosity. He wandered among them, venturing towards their caves, a bold move for a child but they didn’t pay him much mind, watching him the way one would watch an animal meandering in its lawn. Curiosity satisfied, he went home to enjoy what he was told was beef liver. He was fourteen when he finally learned better. It didn’t turn him off the meat, it became a favorite. </p><p>But now Brock sat across him, a creature of indulgence, of sinful desires. And Jack protected him as he did all the others on the island. They feasted once a year -- sometimes twice if the crowd was thin. Most hibernated but Brock rarely did. He had their twice weekly dinner to attend where he was given treats the others weren’t. They were too wild in Jack’s opinion. They didn’t have the social politeness that Brock had. He was still new, he still remembered and it was kept in practice. It was nice to have him around if Jack was to be honest. He liked isolation but like all people he got the craving to see another person, speak to them even if they couldn’t speak back. And that was Brock. If Brock was angry about what he’d become he never showed it. He had been confused but impulses took over quickly and he’d wandered to where the rest of his kind were. </p><p>Jack never would have guessed wendigos were pack creatures. They weren’t great at sharing. He could recall with ease all the time he’d seen campers torns in half when two got into a pulling match. Childish, Jack thought with disgust when he saw it. There were plenty, Jack always made sure of that. He hated when campers tried to swim off the island. They’d just slammed against the rocks and Jack had fish them out before it floated away. A wasted meal. But Brock alway brought him bodies he’d caught, waited patiently for Jack to cut out the liver, thymus gland, pancreas, and should he feel like indulging, he would also cut out the heart for tartare or kidney for stew meat. Then Brock would take the bodies back outside and eat while Jack cleaned up the mess. </p><p>It was a routine well practiced. </p><p>Jack’s knife cut through the crisp crust and through the soft tender meat inside. He cubed it as he had been taught. His mother said just because they lived away from society didn’t mean they didn’t adhere to its rules and expectations. Their idea of humanity was different than most people, dated back to a simpler time with strict expectations. Jack had grown up with these standards, it was ingrained in who he was. Brock looked at him. It was like looking into dark pits but he knew there were eyes in there, sharp eyes made for seeing in the black of night when they hunted. Sometimes Jack missed his chestnut eyes and the wine reddened cheeks. But Jack knew that, should he shed like on what the island really was, he’d try to leave and Jack would have been forced to kill him. </p><p>So this was preferable. Brock would live forever, a gift of immortality. Jack would have to take a wife eventually, the Rollins line had to continue. He’d staved it off for as long as possible, keeping this mansion and the creature before him to himself. It wasn’t forever but for now, he relished in it. </p><p>The gentle click of cutlery made Jack’s eyes soften a bit, ghosts of what was coming clearing in favor of watching it open his maw to expose rows of sharp little teeth designed to tear skin and flay flesh from bone. Jack smiled as the forkful of sweetbread disappeared inside it. Jack missed Brock’s voice sometimes but the chatter was better than nothing. Swirling his wine he felt the creature's eyes on him, asking for something not normally given. Jack set the glass down with a sigh. </p><p>“I’ll be upset if you break it,” Jack prefaced taking down a crystal wine glass, pouring chardonnay in. It was crisp and offset the richness of the meat. “Pyramid Valley 2016 Field of Fire from North Canterbury.” </p><p>It was slightly cloudy, unfiltered, with tastes of lemon peel, bay leaf and floral notes. Jack had selected it because it paired well with the lemon sauce. He set it in front of Brock who carefully set down the fork and took the glass that looked so tiny in his hand. Jack was on edge, not too interested in washing the table cloth so soon. He tipped his head back and carefully poured a bit into his maw. The wine glass was set down and Brock chattered, seeming pleased. </p><p>“It pairs well,” Jack said, guessing that was what the chittering was about. </p><p>The rest of the meal was quiet. Brock slowly, methodically cutting up his meat into acceptable cubes and Jack did the same. The silence never felt heavy or strained. It settled around them, comfortable and formidable. They knew what was coming up -- this was just an appetizer for Brock. </p><p>** ** ** **</p><p>Jack parked the boat and the campers clamored out, excited and chatty. They’d tried to draw Jack into their conversations and he’d engaged politely. He didn’t want to scare them off. He showed them the camping area -- a clearing through a thick bunch of trees. There was a fire pit Jack had designed -- the smoke helped draw the island inhabitants. There was one woman and five men, all friendly with one another. The short black haired man helped the red haired woman pitch her tent. Jack didn’t care to learn their names. They were all the same -- pigs headed towards slaughter. Meals, not people. </p><p>The ring leader, a broad shouldered man thanked Jack for bringing them. Jack nodded his head once. He would be a good meal for one of his creatures. Lots of muscles. His brown haired friend would too. They all would. Jack gave a short goodbye and went to the mansion. He went to the quarter of the mansion rarely used. It was covered with a layer of dust, heavy tarps laid over the antique furniture. It was summer so the temperature was mild as he settled into the armchair and looked out the window. They were sitting around the campfire. He couldn’t see their faces but he imagined they were smiling. Jack was glad they were having a good time. It would have been a pity for them to die unhappily. The creatures were impatient but the fire was too bright for them to dare to intervene yet.</p><p>They used to pick them off one by one but campers caught on and would demand Jack phone the police. So now they had a mass feast. One night of chaos and it was done with. It saved Jack a headache. Still, he watched to ensure everything went well. So if one scattered he’d know where to find them. The fire was burning low, the campers crawling into their tents. Shadows crept from the darkness of the forest. They weren’t stupid creatures, not in the least. One took a clawful of dirt and smothered the fire so they could see better. There were four of them and six campers which meant a fight was inevitable. One slashed open a tent and the chaos erupted. They tried to run and that always amused Jack. Where would they run? It was an island. </p><p>The creatures ate them alive -- except for Brock. He ripped out their throats and put them down before grabbing another. It was how he managed to get more than the others. Jack had taught him to wait and now he had patience the others didn’t. There were six, then five, then then, three and then the last one was being consumed. Brock had gotten two which he dragged along with him as he started for the mansion. </p><p>Jack got to his feet and went down to meet him. The moon lit up Brock who looked at him, head cocked as he waited for Jack to lay out the tarps. It was a bitch to get blood out of the carpet. </p><p>“Thank you,” Jack said as he always did. “I’ll be quick.” </p><p>He worked quickly, as he had promised, the thymus gland, the pancreas, the kidney, the heart and liver. He repeated it again -- he would make it last a year -- and then said, “Bring some bones when you’re done.” </p><p>Jack stepped back and Brock turned around, dragging the bodies along. Jack tidied up, spaying off his tarps before submerging them a large tub of bleach. Back in the kitchen he wrapped his meat in butcher paper and twine. He wrote down what they were and the date before stowing them by the other packages. Jack stood back, admired his collection, and then shut it and prepared for bed. </p><p>Everything was as it should be.</p>
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